


finest hour

by jemmasimmmons



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, just a lot of softness really, mentions of canon temporary character death, set post season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:00:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22577434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: 'But now, armed with the knowledge that she would die to save the world and Chase would change space and time to save her, Gert knows that she cannot be afraid of her feelings for him. They may be big but, if she lets them, they could become her cornerstone. They could become her finest hour.'Gert and Chase talk about heroism, the male gaze and being the best versions of themselves. All in the middle of the night. Set post season three.
Relationships: Chase Stein/Gertrude Yorkes
Comments: 10
Kudos: 58





	finest hour

**Author's Note:**

> i've had this floating around in my brain ever since i watched the finale back in december and i've thought about very little since. i know this has probably been done a hundred times already, but i couldn't help myself. 
> 
> this is my first time writing for runaways, so i hope you enjoy it! if you want to chat, i'm on tumblr @jeemmasimmons and on twitter @jemmasimmmons 💖

The Hostel is quiet tonight.

Partly, Gert is relieved by this. For the last few days, their sunken, underground home has been filled with noise. Between the dimension hopping, the arrival of their parents, and the battle with the most powerful witch of all time, it feels like a long time since she has been able to hear her own thoughts. This, of course, is also the reason why the sudden quiet of the Hostel fills her with trepidation. Gert isn’t quite sure she’s ready to be alone with her own mind.

To distract herself, and to put off the inevitable moment when she will have to lie down and try to sleep, she potters around her bedroom. Dale had left the space in a mess, which she had easily predicted when she’d agreed to let him use it for his experimentation. He had never been the tidiest of scientists.

Old Lace lifts her head as Gert passes by her, letting out a long purr. Gert strokes her absently on the nose as she steps over cracked vials and discarded gardening gloves and a rubber Bunsen burner. Looking at it all now, the remnants of the fight they’d all lost so much to win, it is difficult to believe it is all really over.

Gert is pulled out of her thoughts by a soft knock to the door, followed swiftly by a gentle creaking. She turns, just in time to watch Chase’s head appear from around the door. He smiles, and her heart turns over inside her chest.

‘Hey.’

‘Hi.’ Gert takes a step towards him, suddenly anxious that it is not really over after all, anxious that something else has gone wrong already. ‘Is everything alright?’

Chase nods. ‘Yeah. I just wasn’t sure if you were in here or if you were with Molly still.’

Gert shakes her head. She had put Molly to bed more than an hour ago, after they’d eaten their fill of the stack of pizzas Tina Minoru had ordered. Gert hadn’t eaten much – she’d been too rocked by the events of the evening to manage more than a slice – but her sister had, as always, been ravenous. Once she’d started yawning and swaying to one side though, Gert had dragged her to her feet to help her climb the stairs to bed. Molly had started snoring the moment her head hit the pillow and Gert had tucked a blanket over her before tiptoeing out of the room.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m here. What’s up?’

Chase hesitates, before letting the door swing open further. In his hand, he is clutching a sleeping bag and a pillow.

‘My Dad has taken over the swinging death trap,’ he explains, ‘and your parents and Leslie are using the couches. We haven’t cleaned the other bedrooms of mould yet and I don’t really want to camp outside Nico and Karolina’s room, so I was wondering…’ He looks up at her and his eyes are hopeful. ‘Sleepover?’

It is a loaded word, an apology and an olive branch all in one. Gert takes a moment to register this, to let his expression soak beneath her skin, before nodding her agreement.

‘Sure,’ she whispers, then clears her throat, spreading her arms wide. ‘Pick your spot. Just make sure it isn’t Lace’s, or she’ll knock you on your ass.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Chase says. He closes the door behind him and moves forward to tickle Old Lace under her chin. ‘And I wouldn’t dare, would I, girl?’

Old Lace closes her eyes as a long, drawn-out rumble sounds from the back of her throat with pleasure, making Chase chuckle. Gert watches them together, and experiences a rare sense of peace.

She climbs onto her bed, avoiding the popped spring, and crosses her legs. After leaving Old Lace to drift back into sleep, Chase unfolds his sleeping bag on the floor beside her. He fusses with it, unzipping the side and fluffing his pillow, before sitting back on his heels to admire his work. He looks so ridiculous, so purely proud of himself, that Gert has to bite her lip to stop herself from giggling.

‘Interesting choice,’ she says.

‘Do you think?’

‘Yeah.’ Gert can feel her pulse jumping, but she says as smoothly as she can, ‘I have it on good authority that _this_ is the coolest spot in the room.’

She watches Chase’s eyes zero in on her hand as she pats the space on the bed beside her. He sucks in a breath, suddenly serious.

‘Gert,’ he says, and when he says her name Gert hears _I love you_. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ she whispers with a small smile. ‘Totally sure.’

The way Chase beams back at her, you’d think she’d offered him a fortune. He is still tentative as he climbs up beside her, but once they are sitting shoulder to shoulder, Gert feels him exhale and finds that she too can suddenly breathe easier. Now that they are back here together, with the torn lace curtains behind them and the green silk eiderdown beneath their fingertips, it feels like something has settled back into place. It feels like they are back where they belong.

Chase sighs. ‘Woah. What a crazy night, huh?’

_Crazy_ , Gert thinks, might be a bit of an understatement. They sealed a portal to another dimension. They fought a witch. They met one of their own, travelling through space and time to right a wrong. She closes her eyes and sees blood blooming over a white shirt, like red poppies in the late summer sun.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Crazy.’

When she opens her eyes again, Chase is shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe I missed most of it because I got right-hooked by my future self.’ He frowns. ‘That was kind of a dick move on his part.’

Gert means to laugh this off, but the laughter catches in her throat and becomes a strangled sob. She curls her hands into fists, as if the scarlet stains are still there and she can hide them from his sight. Seeing this, Chase seems to hang back, to tread more carefully.

‘You saw him better than I did,’ he says. ‘Did he…did he talk to you? Did he explain what he was doing here?’

Gert sucks in a breath. She’d known she wouldn’t be able to hide the truth for long. She’d gotten lucky this evening, her friends being too tired to do anything other than assume that future Chase had arrived in the middle of the battle to save their sorry asses from Morgan. But she knew that couldn’t last, not when Tina had heard everything he’d said to her. Gert couldn’t trust Nico’s mom to stay quiet about that for long.

She wanted her friends to hear the truth from her but she owed it to Chase to tell him first. After all, it had been his life. The truth of what had happened tonight belonged to him as equally as it belonged to her. They shared it, it existed as an invisible thread connecting their hearts. The thought of that makes Gert feel brave.

‘He did talk to me,’ she says softly. ‘Not enough for everything to make perfect sense…but it was enough to get a good picture.’

‘Why did he come back?’ Chase asks. ‘What was so important that he – that _I_ – had to invent time travel to fix it?’

Emotion swells inside Gert like a wave rising on the sea.

‘It wasn’t that we didn’t defeat Morgan,’ she says, feeling the need to clarify this. ‘I know that I didn’t say anything earlier and let you guys assume that was why he was here, but it wasn’t. We did beat her in the timeline he came from.’

Chase nods, his forehead puckering as he takes this in. ‘Okay. So it wasn’t to help us win the fight. What was he doing here, then?’

Turning to him, Gert makes sure he is looking at her, really looking at her. As wonderfully brave, as beautifully brash as he is, she knows that Chase can be breathtakingly vulnerable as well. What she has to tell him is a lot for a human being to handle, even one as strong and smart as Chase is. She wants him to see her as she tells it to him and she wants him to know she will hold him up under the weight of it. She licks her lips, preparing herself.

‘We defeated Morgan,’ she says carefully, ‘but in his timeline, in his sequence of events, I died doing it.’ She swallows, hard. ‘We won, but I died.’

The truth, now that she has spoken it, feels much bigger out loud than it had swirling around in Gert’s head. It fixes it down, makes it real. It still terrifies her, but somehow it feels like an anchor too.

She watches Chase’s reaction anxiously, unsure of what to expect. For a fleeting moment, Gert sees a flicker of recognition flash in his eyes, as if he is remembering something that had happened in a dream. Then, it passes.

‘What?’ he croaks. And then, ‘how?’

Gert shakes her head. ‘He didn’t give me the details, exactly. He just told me that if I left the magic room to fight Morgan, I would beat her but I would die doing it.’

‘And you believed him?’ Chase sounds a little incredulous, which makes Gert bristle.

‘Yeah, I did. He knew my plan as if he’d read my mind, or as if he’d seen me do it before. And then when he tried to carry it out himself, he…’ She breaks off, biting her lip. Chase looks away. ‘Besides,’ Gert continues shakily, ‘he was you. Of course I believed him.’

When Chase looks up again, he seems to sit a little taller. Gert gives him a small smile and he returns it, sharing in the knowledge of their mutual trust in one another. A moment later, he frowns.

‘You still ran after him, though,’ he points out. ‘You didn’t stay in the magic room.’

Gert winces. ‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to just stay put when he,’ she pauses, correcting herself, ‘when _you_ needed me. That’s never going to happen.’

‘You could have died.’ She can hear the horror of it in Chase’s voice. His words sound hollow, as though they are coming from far away, from a place where he has seen through the veil to another version of reality, a place where tonight had gone very differently and he is sitting here alone. ‘We could have lost you.’

‘But you didn’t,’ Gert says, softer than she’d ever thought herself capable of. Chase seemed to have that effect on her. She pushes herself to her knees and shuffles closer to him. ‘I’m still here, right here.’

She reaches out, taking his hand from his lap and slipping her own into it. It is a bold decision, but one that she doesn’t regret as Chase grips her back, holding onto her like a lifeline. His hand is warmer than hers is, and Gert can feel his heat slowly seeping below her skin, warming her to the bone.

‘You made sure of that.’

Chase gives a half-hearted scoff. His forehead droops, falling to rest against hers. Gert closes her eyes, allowing herself to momentarily be lost in the feeling of comfort he always gave to her. He smells like pine needles and soap but there is something warmer there, underpinning the other two. His breathing tickles her throat and she knows that if she put her hand to his chest she would be able to feel his heart beating. A quote from a long ago literature class springs to her mind and Gert mouths it to herself as she holds Chase’s hand. _I am, I am, I am_.

She doesn’t realise she is crying until Chase lifts his head and brushes his thumb across her cheekbone to catch a falling tear. Gert feels herself ache with the intimacy of it.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmurs, ‘about what I saw in my algorithm?’

It feels like an abrupt change of subject and makes Gert frown.

‘Um, no?’

She’d certainly been unhealthily curious about what the dream world he’d been trapped in had looked like, especially after hearing about Karolina’s. A small part of her, a very narcissistic part that Gert would much rather keep permanently quashed, had even started to wonder whether what Chase had seen had followed the same narrative. Maybe Jonah only had one plot under his belt: boy – or girl – meets girl.

‘It was the Hostel,’ Chase says, ‘in the middle of a battle. I woke up, right over there, actually,’ he points to where Old Lace is snoring in the corner, ‘and all around me was devastation.’

Gert’s frown deepens. So far, this is not sounding anything like the pastel-coloured fairyland Karolina had described.

‘We’d all been beaten,’ Chase continues, ‘and our parents were there in those red robes and they were preparing another sacrifice. But then I…’ He huffs out a laugh. ‘Then I became this, like, action hero. I jumped off the balcony, I used the fistigons.’ He gives her a look, one that is almost embarrassed. ‘I saved the girl.’

When the realisation hits, Gert rolls her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Urgh, Chase! That is so…’

‘Misogynistic? Objectifying? Believe me, I get it.’ He screws up his face. ‘Actually, it kind of ended up feeling more like a nightmare.’

Gert snorts, and pats him on the knee. ‘Welcome to the male gaze, buddy.’

‘But now I realise, my algorithm got it all wrong. I was never the hero of this story.’ Chase looks down at her and his eyes are shining with such sincerity and admiration that Gert thinks her heart might give out. ‘It was you, Gert. It was always meant to be you.’

He says it so earnestly and with such belief in his words that Gert stutters as she tries to reply. ‘That’s not…I don’t…no, it doesn’t…’ She sighs, shaking her head. ‘I’m not a hero, Chase.’

‘Yeah, you are. Apparently I told you myself.’ He tilts his head to one side and shrugs. ‘You fought Morgan and you won. You saved us all.’

‘I did that in another timeline!’ Gert feels the need to point out. ‘One that doesn’t exist anymore because _you_ invented time travel and risked everything to save my life.’ She can feel her face growing hot. ‘If anyone’s a hero here, Chase, I think it’s you.’

‘I don’t think that should count, seeing as I haven’t actually done it yet.’

‘Oh, yeah? Well, me defeating Morgan shouldn’t count then either, because I did it in another timeline that has now been _erased from existence_.’

They both pause, catching their breaths. Their eyes meet at the exact moment they realise how ridiculous the argument is and the heat of the moment melts immediately. Chase snorts and a bubble of laughter rises to Gert’s lips that she has to clamp her hand over her mouth to stop from escaping. Soon, she has to bury her head in the pillow to stop herself from giggling, and she can feel the whole bed shake with the force of Chase’s laughter.

There is a lightness pulling from the centre of her chest, like she is a balloon rising higher and higher into the sky.

It is only when they stop laughing that Gert realises that she and Chase are now lying down on the bed, their bodies curving towards one another like the ying and the yang. His eyes are resting on her, still sparkling with laughter, but she doesn’t feel burdened by his gaze – it feels comfortable, like she is being seen. If she moved her hand just a little then she’d be able to loop her pinkie through his.

‘It’s pretty ironic when you think about it,’ Chase says.

‘What is?’

‘We’ve both lived our finest hours,’ he says, wistfully, ‘but neither of us can remember doing the stupidly brave, stupidly self-sacrificing things that we did.’

Gert lets out a quiet huff of laughter. ‘I’m not entirely sure irony is the word you mean.’

‘Oh, yeah? What do I mean, then?’

‘I’m not sure. We can look it up in the morning.’ Gert shifts on her side, so that her knees are just brushing Chase’s. ‘But you are right, about the not-remembering thing. I can think of a pretty easy fix for next time, though.’

Chase looks at her quizzically. ‘Next time?’

‘Sure.’ Gert shrugs, not an easy feat while lying on her side. ‘We just have to make a pact that the next time one of us gets it into their head to do something stupidly brave and _slash_ or self-sacrificing, the other one will promise to remember it for them.’

She says it in the hope that it will make Chase laugh again, because she has missed that sound and every time she makes him laugh she feels like she has won some kind of invisible prize. Instead, she just makes him look thoughtful, and he rolls onto his back.

‘I’m not sure I want my finest hour to be some action hero sequence anymore,’ he says slowly. ‘My algorithm says that I think that’s the best thing that I can be, but I don’t think it’s right. I want there to be a better version of me than that.’

Gert pushes herself up onto her elbow. A lone curl has made its way to lie across Chase’s forehead and she leans forward to brush it carefully out of the way with her forefinger.

‘And what,’ she whispers, ‘do you want this better version of you to be?’

He looks up at her, shyly, and Gert is stuck by the depth of feeling in his eyes. She wonders whether it all belongs to him, or whether she is seeing the reflection of her own eyes gazing back at her.

‘Somebody,’ Chase says, ‘who is worthy of being loved by you.’

It feels like he has lit up the inside of her heart, illuminating the truth she has always known. They haven’t spoken yet about when he’d told her he loved her, or how she had kissed him in the garage before everything had gone down. There hadn’t been the time, and even if there had been, Gert doesn’t know if she’d have been able to go about it. All those feelings felt too big still, too vast and infinite for her to pin down.

But now, armed with the knowledge that she would die to save the world and Chase would change space and time to save her, Gert knows that she cannot be afraid of her feelings for him. They may be big but, if she lets them, they could become her cornerstone. They could become her finest hour.

‘In which case,’ she says, ‘I have some good news for you.’

She bends forward, pausing only momentarily to revel in the joyous disbelief in Chase’s eyes, before bringing her lips to his. She kisses him, long and slow, hoping that in the shape of her lips Chase will read everything that he needs to know. From the way that he winds his fingers back into her hair, he does.

In the morning, the sun rises behind them, speckling the room with soft golden light and throwing into relief the best selves they were yet to be.


End file.
